Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas ed. by Stephanie Kirk and Sara Rivett (review)

Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett’s Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas is an important contribution to ongoing scholarly discussions concerning both “America” and “modernity,” these terms’ definitional parameters, and religion’s role in both their construction(s) and contestation(s). Cutting across disciplines and methodologies, this edited volume includes a number of approaches to analyzing the transnational similarities and differences in the Iberian and English encounter with and colonization of the New World. Using a comparative methodology that brings together an impressive interdisciplinary group, Kirk and Rivett’s volume captures the complexities embedded in the relationship between religion and empire, as well as in the historicizing of it.

A connecting thread present to some extent in each essay is the desire to unsettle long-held distinctions between Anglo-Protestant and Iberian-Catholic “America.” As Kirk and Rivett point out in their introductory essay, this division has often worked to reinforce and perpetuate stereotypes of Protestantism’s modernizing capacity over and against the monolithic and coercive nature of Catholicity (22). The Black Legend, for instance, has maintained some staying power in the narration of early modern America, establishing conceptions of Anglo exceptionalism that continue to influence what is prioritized in delineating American modernity. In this sense, religion remains a powerful pivot around which national narratives and imaginaries take shape and, importantly, informs the ways in which scholars both tell and situate themselves within these stories. Kirk and Rivett, then, invite scholars representing various disciplines and nationalities to continue the crucial work of interhemispheric and postcolonial retellings and reimaginings of “religion” in “America.” The inclusion of Latin American scholars in this volume is an important step in expanding American epistemologies and categories, as well as in deconstructing narratives that have for too long marginalized their voices.

J. H. Elliott—whose monumental work Empires of the Atlantic World (2007) is one of the most important contributors to North-South comparative scholarship—comes closest to reinforcing the old and problematic distinctions between Catholic and Protestant America. Elliott, for instance, writes, “But if we compare the religious character and experience of the Protestant and Roman Catholic worlds, it would seem that Protestant America had a greater range of resources than Catholic America for confronting the enormous challenges that the winning of independence would bring in its wake” (45). Even as Elliott endeavors to provide extensive analysis of political and economic factors alongside religious ones—as well as the different imperial approaches that affected the forms that colonialism took in New England and New Spain—his conclusions arguably reinforce the kind of Protestant exceptionalism that this volume in general eschews. The editors’ decision to begin with Elliott is an appropriate and well-deserved gesture toward both the field’s indebtedness to him as well as its movement away from his conclusions.

With keen editorial oversight and organization, Kirk and Rivett knit together disparate topics—including demonology, martyrdom, and Jesuit mapmaking—into a coherent and compelling collection. Each essay—from Elliott’s “Religions on the Move” to Sandra Gustafson’s “Between Cicero and Augustine”—traces sites of religious interaction and transformation, revealing the shared and distinct patterns of colonial meaning making and confusion engendered in and through the meeting of European, indigenous, and African cultures. These authors, for the most part, resist reducing particular modes of colonization—either English or Spanish—to stable and propositional theological motivations. Instead, these essays look at the diversity and fluidity that abounded within and between English Protestantism and Spanish Catholicism in the face of “New World” challenges, opportunities, and resistances.

The volume is divided into four parts (“Comparisons,” “Crossings,” “Missions,” “Legacies”). While essays are situated within these parts to address particular themes, they nevertheless often overlap. We learn throughout, for instance, that ethnographic observations and essentializing anthropologies of indigenous populations undergirded Spanish and English strategy and posturing within and across empires. In this regard, Ralph Bauer’s “Baroque New Worlds” provides an...